Practice, Person, Social World

Text Exploration

It’s common for educational experiences to be thought of as one-directional: knowledge is understood to be transferred from one person to another, and the knowledge is then assimilated into the receiver’s mind. This delineates an outside and an inside, and separates a learner from the environment of learning: it implies that knowledge exists, we can (and must) know it, and learning is the process of knowing it.

The zone of proximal development is a commonly cited alternative to this approach, but even this theory of learning as a social activity may be limiting. One limited read of the zone of proximal development is that collaboration, while social, is only practice for eventually working alone; another limited view of the theory is that understanding social history provides context, but only in pursuit of owned knowledge.

A third view, embraced by the authors, is a view of proximal development that connects “issues of sociocultural transformation with the changing relations between newcomers and old-timers in the context of a changing shared practice.” Newcomers slowly participate more fully, and this increased participation then supports the relational, communal nature of learning. This is a theory of social practice that combines the negotiated perspective of meaning in a world that is considered socially and culturally structured, with gradual immersion and contribution to that structure then changing the structure.

This has implications on domain-specific teaching and learning. The authors view that “knowledge domains” of specific skills, methods and facts, cannot be considered leading or following in learning, but instead are intertwined in a process of “becoming a different person with respect to the possibilities enabled by these systems of relations.” This is not just “learning”; it is identity development, which is not a process with an end, but one that persists as one’s “membership” in the community changes and evolves.

Learning exists in a social world, and learning-in-practice (during apprenticeship) shows the social world overlapping with history and multi-generational participation. Apprentices and masters are at various stages of periphery or central engagement, and this indicates learning but also conflict. “Contradictions and struggles [are] inherent in social practice,” and this is evidenced when established (old-timers) and less established (newcomers) begin to overlap and displace one-another. This is where a community of practice is acknowledged as self-generative: it produces its own future through constant reconstruction.